Title: The Songs of Chu (Chuci) Author: Qu Yuan and others Creation Date: c. 4th–3rd century BCE Location: China
Summary
The Chuci — Songs of Chu, or Songs of the South — is an anthology of poems from the southern state of Chu, built around the work of Qu Yuan (c. 340–c. 278 BCE), the first Chinese poet known to us by name. Its centrepiece is Li Sao ("Encountering Sorrow"), a 373-line visionary poem in which the exiled minister rides a jade chariot through the heavens, consorts with gods and mythical beings, and mourns the corrupt court that cast him out. Around it orbit shamanistic hymns to river goddesses and mountain spirits, elegies for the war dead, and cosmic journeys to the far edges of the universe. The anthology was gathered and annotated by the Han scholar Wang Yi in the 2nd century CE, and remains the defining monument of southern Chinese literary culture. Where the northern Shijing is restrained and ceremonial, the Chuci is ecstatic, anguished, and wildly imaginative — a second pole around which the entire tradition revolves.
Why This Book Matters
Qu Yuan invented an archetype that Chinese literature never abandoned: the loyal, righteous man cast out by a corrupt court, driven by principle to destruction. His suicide by drowning in the Miluo River in around 278 BCE became one of the most charged acts in Chinese cultural memory, commemorated each year in the Dragon Boat Festival — a rare case of a literary death shaping popular ritual across two millennia. But the Chuci matters beyond biography. It established a distinct southern Chinese literary tradition — shamanic, emotional, densely ornate — that stood apart from the ritual sobriety of the northern Shijing. Together they defined the twin poles of Chinese poetic expression: public duty and private anguish, ceremony and vision. Without the Chuci, Chinese literature would be less than half of what it became.
Historical Context
Qu Yuan served as minister to the king of Chu during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), when seven major states competed in a generations-long struggle for dominance that ended with Qin's brutal unification in 221 BCE. Chu was the largest and most culturally singular of these states — a southern kingdom stretching across the Yangtze basin, with shamanic religious traditions, river goddess cults, and a mythological imagination that set it apart from the austere ritual culture of the northern heartland. Court rivals poisoned the king's confidence in Qu Yuan, and he was sent into internal exile. From that distance, he watched Chu's capital fall to Qin forces in 278 BCE. Unable to bear the defeat, he walked into the Miluo River and drowned — an act of political despair that became China's foundational story of the poet as moral conscience.
Literary Significance
Li Sao is one of the most formally ambitious poems to survive from the ancient world — 373 lines of sustained visionary allegory in which political exile, cosmic journey, and spiritual anguish are woven into a single sustained aria. Qu Yuan developed the sao form specifically for it: longer, more flexible lines than the four-character regularity of the Shijing, capable of carrying interior complexity and extended metaphor. His symbolic code — fragrant orchids for loyalty, corrupt ministers as foul weeds, beautiful women for political virtue — entered Chinese poetry as permanent currency and was still being drawn on a thousand years later by Du Fu and Su Shi. The anthology's shamanic hymns, meanwhile, preserve ritual traditions that would otherwise be entirely lost. David Hawkes' 1985 Penguin Classics translation, The Songs of the South, remains the standard English rendering: scholarly, beautifully phrased, and fully annotated.
Research Notes
David Hawkes' 1985 Penguin Classics translation, The Songs of the South, is the gold standard in English — learned, poetic, and annotated with the patience of a lifetime's scholarship. Hawkes was the first to translate the full anthology, not just Li Sao, and his framing of the Chuci as a distinctly southern, shamanic counterpoint to northern Confucian culture remains the interpretive baseline. The anthology was compiled and commented on by Wang Yi in the 2nd century CE Han dynasty, the moment at which these poems were canonised. For Western readers, the Chuci may actually be more immediately gripping than the Shijing — its hallucinatory imagery, personal anguish, and mythological strangeness feel surprisingly modern. The shamanic hymns reward reading alongside comparative mythology, and Qu Yuan's political despair speaks directly to any tradition that has asked what a writer owes to a state that betrays him.
The Reading
Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow)
I am the scion of the high lord Gao Yang. My father was Bo Yong. On the day of gengyin, the seventh of the first month, in the season when Jupiter shone in yin, I was let down into the world. My father looked upon the auspicious signs of my coming, divined them, and gave me a name worthy of them. True Exemplar he called me, the child-name. Divine Balance he gave me afterwards, the formal name a man carries before kings.
Inner beauty I had from the beginning — this was my father's gift; cultivation I added to it myself. I draped my shoulders in jiang and zhi, the sweet grasses of the marsh; I twisted orchids into the strings of my sash. I gathered angelica on the morning bank and melilotus in the evening field. I ran from plant to plant as if running from old age itself, for the days do not wait for any man — the spring sheds its blossoms before the autumn comes, and the orchid wilts before the basil. I thought I was preparing myself for service. I thought a king who saw what I wore would know me.
I served King Huai of Chu — Chu, the great southern kingdom, the largest of the Warring States that contended in those years for what remained of the Zhou inheritance, the only state whose shamans still knew the names of the spirits of every river. I drafted his laws. I went out to foreign courts and spoke for him. He was, in the beginning, glad of me.
But there were others in the hall who wore stinking weeds and called them orchid. They went to the king behind my back. They poisoned his ear with lies the way a man poisons a well from which others must drink. The age is muddied, envious of the able, eager to hide one's beauty. The king turned his face from me. He sent me away from the court — first into a kind of grey forgetting, then into the open exile of a man banished from his own land. From the bank of a river far from the capital I watched the towers of Chu, and I watched, year by year, the men who had taken my place lead the state I loved toward the precipice.
I planted nine fields of orchids and a hundred acres of melilotus. I set borders of azalea and sweet basil, and between the rows I sowed cassia and lovage. I waited for them to flower. I had no doubt of the seed; I had no doubt of my own hand. Yet, though the orchids seemed sturdy, they bore no flowers. They cast off their beauty and joined the common weeds. This was the deepest of the cuts: not the king's coldness, but the betrayal of the fragrant plants themselves, as if even the soil of Chu had been corrupted by what now ruled it.
If this is the kind of beauty that is now in fashion — wearing mugwort as if it were orchid — then what can I do? I could not change. I would not change. Rather would I die quickly and have done with it! I could not bring myself to be like those others.
Then the earth fell away from me. I yoked flying dragons to my chariot. I made its frame of jade. The bridle was woven of cloud. I rose into the sky above Chu and rode upward through the cold thin air toward the gates of heaven, looking for someone — some sovereign, some bright woman, some soul anywhere in the four quarters — fit to receive a loyalty no king of earth would take. I came to the heavenly gate; the porter would not open it. I sought audience with the ancient emperors of mythology, the lords who had ruled the world before the world remembered ruling. I sent a go-between to Fufei, the goddess of the Luo River, the beautiful drowned daughter of Fu Xi — and she received him haughtily, vainly, looking past him for a finer suitor. I went after the daughters of the Lord of the West, who proved fickle, who had been promised already, who could not be relied on. At each gate something failed: the intermediary stammered, the hour was wrong, the divine beloved already spoken for.
I looked back and sighed; I looked all about me to the ends of the earth and the margins of heaven; my spirit wandered to and fro, disappointed and grieving.
I went down to the shaman Ling Fen, who divined for me with stalks and bones. She told me the world was wide. What need to cling to one city alone? — there were worthy mates at great distance, kings in far countries who would honour a fragrant minister. But I could not. My loyalty to Chu was not a calculation; it was the marrow of my bones. My heart can never yield to others. These are the bonds of my spirit. I remembered Peng Xian, the ancient minister who, when his king grew deaf to him, walked into the river and let the water take him; and I said in my heart: this is what I will follow.
Three hundred and seventy-three lines the song breathes, and at the end of every long line falls the breath-particle xi — half sigh, half cry — that gives the southern song its keening. The line of the old northern Odes was four characters, four characters, clean and brief; my line is longer, irregular, swelling on a thought and contracting on a wound, and the xi falls at its hinge like the inheld breath of a man trying not to weep. No verse that had ever been sung in the lands of the Zhou before me had reached so high or fallen so far in a single flight.
The Nine Songs (Jiu Ge)
Older than my own grief are the eleven hymns we still call the Nine, the songs the shamans of Chu have sung in the river-marshes since before any king's name was written down. They do not beg the god; they put on the god, or the god's lover, or the god's mourner, and let the rite move through them.
The first hymn welcomes the Great Unity, Lord of the Eastern Sky, who comes down on cloud upon cloud, his long sword of green jade in his hand, his many pendants of jade clinking softly at his belt. I bathed in orchid water, washed my hair in scented waters, and put on the many-coloured garments. The shaman prepares as a bride prepares for her bridegroom; the god descends; for a breath the room is no longer the room.
Then the Lord within the Clouds, the spirit of rain and storm, robed in the rainbow, girt with the sunset, who makes the thunder roll and turns the high cloud into a banner. The worshipper, mortal again, watches him go. Long I gaze at you, absorbed — my heart is full of trouble.
Then the Lady of the Xiang and the Lord of the Xiang — the two river-spirits of the great southern stream — calling each to the other across the water and never meeting. The Lady stands on the northern island and looks across to the far shore for the Lord of the River; she builds him a meeting-house out of the things the marsh gives her — the walls are of iris, the chambers of purple shells; the doorposts are of cassia, the lintels of magnolia. Every beam is fragrant; every wall is going to dissolve at dawn. I heard my love was calling me, and I will ride and go to her, sings the Lord across the channel. But the channel is wide. The gods are as lonely as we are.
Then the Greater Master of Fate, who rules life and death: Open wide the gates of heaven! On a dark cloud I ride in splendour. And the Spirits of the Fallen, the dead of Chu's wars — the men sent out against the armies of the north, who went out and never came back, while the level plain stretches on and on. Their bones are in the long grass. Their souls cannot find the road home. And yet: with steady purpose they faced danger; once resolved, there was no turning back. Their bodies perished but their spirits were alert — valiant in death, heroes among the ghosts. No civilisation before mine had set a war-elegy on the page in this way: not as the praise of a captain, not as the inscription on a bronze, but as the cry of the unburied themselves, the men who marched out under the banners of Chu and lay where they fell.
Tian Wen (Heavenly Questions)
And then there is the song that is nothing but questions. One hundred and eighty-six lines, no answer in any of them, hurled upward against the dome of the sky.
Who was there in the beginning? Who transmitted the tale? Before form was, before the light was sorted out from the dark, who was there to see and to remember? How was the round of heaven established? How was the square of earth measured? Why does day come and go?
Where are the nine bends of the River? Where does it flow and where does it turn? What did the sun not reach? Where does the candle dragon shine?
Why did Yi shoot down the suns? Why did the ravens shed their feathers?
Where do the four quarters end? Where do the eight pillars connect?
The questions march through the old myths — the gods, the founding heroes, the rise of Shang and the fall of Shang, the rise of Zhou and the wavering of Zhou — and they answer nothing. They pile up until the floor of certainty drops out from under whoever is listening. Perhaps it is a ritual; perhaps an exercise; perhaps the open protest of a man who has found that the universe will not explain itself, and who has decided to make a music of that refusal.
Jiu Zhang (Nine Declarations)
Then the nine declarations — songs in my own voice, without the cosmic chariot, without the jade dragons. Only the man on the riverbank, looking back.
In Lamenting the Capital I turn my face to the north and see, far off, the towers of Ying, the city I served. I see the river that ran past it; I see even the slow clouds that pass over its roofs. I looked toward my old country and heaved a deep sigh; my tears poured down like rain. No allegory now. No orchid. Only a man in exile, and the sky, and the water.
In Crossing the River the river itself is carrying me. I praise the ancient sages who chose death rather than serve unworthy princes. I name Peng Xian again, who walked into the water; I name Bo Yi, who starved on Shouyang Mountain rather than eat the grain of a king he could not honour. I shall make Bo Yi my exemplar. I shall sink myself in the abyss and die. The current is moving. I am no longer arguing with anyone.
Zhao Hun (Summons of the Soul)
And there is one song more — the great summoning, the song the shaman sings to call a wandering soul back into its body before the soul is lost. O soul, come back! — do not go east, where the giants devour men; do not go south, where vipers thicker than a man's wrist sleep in the marsh and the heat eats the bones; do not go west, where the shifting sands roll like sea over a land without water; do not go north, where the ice reaches to the rim of the sky and the snow falls without end. Do not climb to the upper heavens — there are tigers and leopards there with nine heads to a body, watching the gate. Do not descend to the dark earth below — the lord of that place is horned and his hands are bloody.
O soul, come back! — return instead to Chu, where the great halls stand. There are pillars carved with dragons and chambers hung with kingfisher feathers; there are attendants slender as willow shoots, with their long sleeves and their narrow waists, who will dance for you to the beat of drums and the tremor of zithers. There is roasted duck on the table, and stewed turtle in fragrant broth, and sour soup, and the small game of the southern hills. There is wine — rice wine clarified to the colour of amber, and honey mead, and the new spirit pressed from millet. There is music until the torches gutter. O soul, come back! Why should you go to the four ends of the earth?
Whose soul is being summoned the song does not quite say. A king's soul; a dead man's soul; perhaps my own, half-departed already in exile, hovering above the dark water of the river that will soon take me.
For the river did take me, in the year the Qin armies broke through and seized the capital of Chu — the year by their reckoning two hundred and seventy-eight before their common era. The news reached me in my exile. Chu had fallen. The fragrant garden I had planted was now a meadow of mugwort, and there was no longer any throne in the south to which a loyal man might address a song. I walked to the bank of the Miluo. I gathered a stone into my robe. I stepped into the water. The fishermen of the village, when they understood what I had done, rowed their long boats out and beat the water with their oars to frighten the river dragons from my body; they threw parcels of rice wrapped in leaves into the current to keep the fish from my flesh. They have not stopped. Every fifth day of the fifth month, on the rivers of every part of China, the long boats still go out and the rice is still thrown into the water.
What remained was the song. The fragrant plants, the jewelled chariot, the dragon-flight, the river-gods, the unbearable loyalty to a country that had cast its loyal man out. Every poet that came after — Li Bai a thousand years later, Du Fu in the next breath, Su Shi later still — wrote with my long shadow falling across his page. They learned from me to put the cassia and the orchid in the line, to lift off the earth when the earth had failed, to make a poetry out of the cry of a man who would not bend and would not be silent. Rather would I die quickly and have done with it. I did. The song did not.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
David Hawkes' translation, published in Penguin Classics as The Songs of the South (1985), is superb — learned, poetic, and thoroughly annotated. It remains the essential English version of the Chuci. A later revised edition appeared in 2011.
By David Hawkes. The scholarly standard in English — richly annotated and beautifully translated.
By David Hawkes. The revised Penguin Classics edition, updated and expanded.
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